In the wake (written 10 days after by Webster Tarpley) of the massacre at Fort Hood Texas, two principal theories have emerged to explain the conduct of the accused shooter, identified by the U.S. Army as Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist of Jordanian-Palestinian ancestry. One of these theories is embraced by left liberals and other supporters and acolytes of the Obama regime, and argues that Major Hasan is a sincere and devout Muslim who was the victim of a tragic contradiction between his religious faith and the logic of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, both the heritage of the odious Bush-Cheney regime. According to this version, Hasan must be viewed as a troubled and tormented individual who “snapped,” breaking down psychologically under the stress of his awful predicament. Here is how Obama summed up this approach: “Even within the extraordinary military that we have — and I think everybody understands how outstanding the young men and women in uniform are under the most severe stress — there are going to be instances in which an individual cracks.” (New York Times, 10 Nov and ember 2009) Calling Major Hasan a terrorist amounts, in this view, to racism and vindictive prejudice.
The other theory is the one advocated by assorted neocons, reactionaries, Islamophobes and others generally hostile to Obama. This account maintains that Major Hasan was a homegrown, self-starting Islamic terrorist, trumpeting his devotion to jihad and suicide bombing, seeking to make contact with “Al Qaeda,” and generally filled with hate for America , for freedom, and for his fellow soldiers. In this view, it is only the pervasive political correctness and multicultural obsession of the subversive-riddled and soft on terrorism Obama regime that prevented Major Hasan from being neutralized before he could act, and which prevents Obama and his Democratic allies from telling the truth after the fact.
These views are both superficial, naïve, and inadequate.[1] They amount to two prongs of an articulated campaign of media hysteria and mass manipulation designed on the one hand to prod the dithering Wall Street puppet Obama who is having second thoughts about his own political survival — into an early decision in favor of massive escalation of the war in Afghanistan for the purpose of hastening the breakup of Pakistan, and thus threatening China. On the other hand, the delirium of Islamophobic hatred being ginned up against Major Hasan by the usual cast of reactionary radio ogres (Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Levin) seeks to accentuate and strengthen the racist and xenophobic elements in the militant anti-Obama opposition, in particular among the Tea Party movement. The decision to put the infamous Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his confreres on trail in New York City, plus the recent government seizure of numerous US mosques and other buildings on the grounds that they are Iranian assets, also contribute to a growing mood of anti-Moslem hysteria. This atmosphere is accentuated by the reckless and irresponsible actions of some Moslem groups which happen to be foundation-funded, and must thus be considered as part of the apparatus of US domestic social control.
The media narrative which is now being consolidated a week after the shootings is full of contradictions, embarrassed silences, and absurdities. A third and distinct approach to this case is therefore required, one which regards Major Hasan as a manipulated patsy in the context of a relatively sophisticated operation mounted by forces within the US intelligence community, using methods and assets which by now ought to have become familiar. Major Hasan can be seen as a mixture of Lee Harvey Oswald, legendary 9/11 “suicide pilot” Mohammed Atta, and Cho Seung-Hui (the alleged April 2007 Virginia Tech shooter). He also has elements of reputed Robert Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan, and of John Hinckley Jr., who was involved in an attempt to kill President Reagan both of whom survived the operations in which they were implicated. He thus represents a new cocktail of patsy ingredients.
Until now, Islamic terrorists had come in collectivist groups, and not alone. Major Hasan by contrast is a troubled loner in the tradition of Oswald, at the same time that he embodies the religious fanaticism of Atta, along with some of his peccadilloes. Major Hasan is that novelty, a troubled Islamic fundamentalist loner, even though this is something of a contradiction in terms. Like Cho, Major Hasan emerges from the psychiatric clinic, in his case as a practicing psychiatrist, but as a shrink with egregious symptoms of his own. Like all patsies, Major Hasan combines the flamboyant and bombastic proclamation of his personal creed with a seeming immunity from bureaucratic countermeasures which would normally be automatic in shutting him down. Hasan is revealed as a fanatic, a misfit, and a quasi-psychotic or psychotic mental case in his own right who could not subsist without protectors in high places of the US intelligence community.
In my 2005 book 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism, I argued that 9/11 and other recent terrorist attacks represented provocations cynically orchestrated by privately controlled rogue networks operating within the US intelligence agencies for purposes of mass political manipulation. Starting from an overview of terrorist actions from the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 through 9/11, I developed a method of analysis of state-sponsored false flag terrorism which distinguished the roles of fanatical, duped, or psychotic patsies like Oswald, of subversive moles ensconced as officials within government agencies, and of technicians or professional killers who actually create the observed effects, all commanded and coordinated from outside of government, and all operating within the atmosphere of mass brainwashing provided by the Wall Street media. I also highlighted the role of drills and exercises which are hijacked and turned into real-world terror attacks. In order to understand the Fort Hood massacre, it is indispensable to apply this method here as well.
TROOPS THOUGHT IT WAS A DRILL DID MAJOR HASAN THINK SO TOO?
In investigations like this, it is generally a great mistake to fixate on the scapegoat dished up by the mass media. The more we focus on the Oswald of the day, the less we understand of what actually happened. Let us turn away from the TV pundits, and listen instead to the eyewitness testimony of the troops who were present at the shootings. Many of them are on record agreeing that the events of November 5 were initially interpreted by those on the scene as an exercise, as a drill. Emphasis will be added to bring out this central fact.
From ABC News we get the following testimony: Solider Keara Bono ‘told “Good Morning America” today that she initially thought the scene of Hasan standing up, praising Allah and starting to fire was a drill. She didn’t believe it was real even when she felt her own blood, she said. “Then I looked to my left and right and I saw people that were bleeding,” she said. That’s when Bono realized that Hasan’s rampage wasn’t a drill.’ (ABC News GMA)[2]
In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel of 9 November 2009 we find: “Pfc. Amber Bahr of Random Lake [ Wisconsin ] heard someone yelling and ducked at the sound of gunfire, but she said she thought supervisors at Fort Hood were holding a drill last Thursday. She didn’t know she was under live fire until she heard people screaming.”[3] This story was based on an interview given to NBC’s Today show.
CBS News reported: “Two days after narrowly escaping death at Fort Hood and just hours after his release from the hospital, Corporal Nathan Hewitt still can’t believe what happened was real. The survivor spoke to CBS News Correspondent Don Teague about those fateful minutes. Even after being shot, Hewitt didn’t believe what was happening. He thought the gunfire was a training exercise and that he’d been hit by a rubber bullet. He says other victims thought the same thing.”[4]
ABC newsman Bob Woodruff found further corroboration of this general impression when he was allowed to interview shooting victims who were recovering in the hospital: “For many of the 43 people wounded when an Army psychiatrist allegedly went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, the scene was unreal — it seemed like something out of a movie. Maybe it was a drill. .Capt. Dorrie Carskadon, a combat stress specialist from Wisconsin , who was at Fort Hood training for a deployment to Afghanistan , said she initially thought the shooting was a drill.”[5] Notice that this testimony comes from a field grade officer, a captain.
The Austin television station KXAN provides the following evidence: ‘Spc. Scott Hamrick and First Sergeant James McLeod made it out of the Soldier Readiness Processing Center alive after some maneuvering to get away from the suspect, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. “My initial thought is that it was a drill,” said Hamrick. “Because you know you’re always getting drilled for situations.” However, what Hamrick thought was a drill turned out to be something closer to war at home.'[6]
The Miami Herald furnished this account: ‘For Skip Blancett, the senior pastor at the First United Methodist Church of Killeen, news of the shooting left him anguishing for hours because his daughter, Hollye Davis, was at a building next door to where the gunman started firing. She and others were in lockdown for hours. Without a cellphone, she couldn’t call home. “They had no idea what was going on; everyone thought it was a drill at first,” Blancett said.'[7]
The idea that the shooting was part of a drill or exercise was so widespread that it had to be expressly countered in the first emergency announcement posted on the Fort Hood web site, which read: “Effective immediately. Fort Hood is closed. Organizations/units are instructed to execute a 100 per cent accountability of all personnel. This is not a drill. It is an emergency situation.”[8]
Based on this testimony, it seems clear that unannounced, surprise terror drills are standard operating procedure at Fort Hood and probably other military bases as well. They are frequent enough to be the first thing many soldiers, including at least one officer, thought was happening. Drills are designed to be as realistic as possible. But the acme of realism is reality real killing, which can occur through small but decisive changes in the unfolding of the drill. We may therefore be dealing here with a drill which has been taken live or flipped live, as so often happens in terror incidents.[9]
This array of evidence allows us to pose the following question: If so many of the Army personnel on the scene thought at first that the incident was a drill, did Major Hasan also think he was attending a drill? Did he imagine that he was going to be an actor playing the assigned role of a member of the terrorist red team in a realistic exercise? In other words, was this inept, troubled and quasi-psychotic individual somehow under the impression that he was attending an officially sanctioned exercise of some routine type, until real bullets began to be fired by other more qualified shooters, thus taking the drill live? This might also help us to account for the extraordinary intensity of firing at the scene well over 100 rounds. For this working hypothesis to stand up, we would have to show that there were other gunmen firing gunmen who knew that the drill was turning into a real massacre. The additional shooters would according to the classification referred to above represent the technicians in this action the trained killers who have the ability to do the things that the patsy is accused of doing. Interestingly enough, extra gunmen are exactly what we find.
ONE SHOOTER, OR THREE?
How many shooters were there? Early reports indicated that there were at least one, and perhaps two, in addition to Major Hasan. Dow Jones newswires reported at about 5 PM Eastern Time: “A second gunman is in custody after a shooting at the Army’s Fort Hood in Texas in which at least seven people were killed and 12 wounded, reports KCEN-TV of Waco. The report comes about two hours after a first suspect was captured, shortly after gunfire broke out.”[10] According to the Dow Jones report cited, shooting had occurred in two separate locations on the Fort Hood base: “The incident reportedly began at Fort Hood ‘s theater and then moved to the Soldier Readiness Processing Center , Killeen City Public Information Officer Hillary Shine told Fox News.” According to an AP wire, these facts were also announced by an official Army spokesman at the base: “The spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Banks, says two shooters were apparently involved. There is no word yet on who they were, nor on identities of the dead. Banks says the second incident took place at a theater on the sprawling base.” [11]
Many of the embarrassing reports about multiple shooters have been purged after the fact from websites, but a few have survived, as in the case of this Wisconsin radio station, where we read that the triple assassin theory had been embraced by the commander of the base: “Newsradio 620 WTMJ: Lt. General Bob Cone at Fort Hood confirms 12 dead, 31 hurt in shooting. Soldier gunman killed. 2 others in custody.”[12] During the later afternoon, cable television talked of three shooters, and in the London Daily Mirror account we find: “Twelve people were killed and 31 wounded when three gunmen in uniform opened fire at the US Army’s largest armoured base in Texas yesterday. One gunman was shot by civilian police and the two others held at Fort Hood .”[13]
GEN. CONE BRINGS MAJOR HASAN BACK FROM THE DEAD AFTER 8 HOURS
It was only in the late evening that the official lone assassin version of these events was assembled in another press conference by General Cone held about eight hours after the shooting had started: ” KILLEEN , Texas (KXAN/AP/MSNBC) – Twelve died and another 31 were hurt in a mass shooting on Fort Hood that stunned the nation on Thursday. Accused gunman Major Malik Nidal Hasan is alive and in stable condition, Lt. Gen. Bob Cone said at a Thursday evening news conference just outside the storied military post – the largest in the United States . Counter to initial reports, the 39-year-old psychiatrist – who was thought to be killed by local police – is hospitalized and not expected to die of multiple gunshots wounds sustained during the 1:30 p.m. attack. The local police officer who allegedly shot Hasan and injured him is in the hospital also in stable condition.”[14]
In the course of the day, we had thus gone from three shooters to only one. The separate shooting incident at the Howze theater on the post reported earlier had also been expunged in the process. Most remarkable of all was the ability of Major Hasan to come back from the dead after eight hours in which the world had been assured of his demise. Such resurrection is of course a physical impossibility for mere mortals. When individuals are alleged to have performed deeds which are physically impossible in the world as we know it, from Oswald’s feats of shooting to Atta’s (and Hani Hjanjour’s) feats of flying, we must become suspicious that intelligence agencies are assisting the probable patsies in hidden ways. Major Hasan is said to have fired more than 100 rounds using the two pistols he is alleged to have carried. This seems like a lot of shooting for a single person surrounded by scores of trained combat veteran soldiers, even if these latter had not been carrying their usual weapons.
The categorical imperative for every patsy is to get noticed, and to call attention to himself or herself pointedly and repeatedly, by hook or by crook. They must stand out so much that they will be remembered by many ordinary people after the process of their demonization has been launched. In order to fulfill their function, patsies must leave a trail of clues and evidence which will tie themselves and the larger target group they supposedly represent to the heinous actions they will shortly be accused of having committed. Oswald handed out leaflets sympathetic to Cuba and told a television audience that he was a Marxist. He went to the USSR, and tried to go to Cuba.
Atta cultivated a frightening stare, and took time to argue ostentatiously about a parking place at an airport in Maine while he allegedly thought he was on his way to death. Major Hasan seems to have some of the same strange proclivities. On the day of the shooting, Major Hasan made sure there was no doubt about his religious loyalties by donning a trademark “Islamic” white robe and skull cap to go to his local Seven-Eleven, where he was sure to be filmed by the security cameras there. This footage was then played on all the networks for the next 48 hours. This gesture recalls the Koran Atta left in his car at Boston ‘s Logan airport. When the FBI located Atta’s rented car, they found a copy of the Koran, airline schedules, terrorist literature and videotapes, and Atta’s crudely forged last will and testament in the luggage all obviously and crudely left behind to make the necessary point. Atta’s will betrayed the amateurish attempt of some half-baked area specialist to sound Islamic.
At Fort Hood , Major Hasan ‘told a colleague, Col Terry Lee, that he believed Muslims should rise up against American “aggressors.”‘ [15] Count de Borchgrave points out that Major Hasan had made at least one overtly ominous statement just before the shooting spree: ‘As the Virginia-born major told a female neighbor in his apartment complex, “I’m going to do good work for God.”‘[16] The neighbor would not forget that grim pledge anytime soon. Major Hasan was suspected of having authored internet postings that compared suicide bombers with soldiers who throw themselves on hand grenades to save others, although here we must be cautious, since these postings could have been made by imposters. All accounts agree that witnesses heard a shout of “Allahu Akbar” just before the firing started. Less clear is whether these words were spoken by Major Hasan. And if he did say them, was this a line from the scenario script of a drill?
MAJOR HASAN’S RANT TO MILITARY DOCTORS: “WE LOVE DEATH MORE THAN YOU LOVE LIFE”
The most elaborate attempts by Major Hasan to assert and establish a thoroughly Islamic profile for himself came in the form of a lecture at the Uniformed Service University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda , Maryland . He was supposed to present a paper on an issue of medical or clinical interest, but instead elected to make a ranting speech about the oppression of Moslems in the US military and the dangerous consequences this was sure to have. Here are some relevant parts of the account published by Dana Priest in the Washington Post: ‘The Army psychiatrist believed to have killed 13 people at Fort Hood warned a roomful of senior Army physicians a year and a half ago that to avoid “adverse events,” the military should allow Muslim soldiers to be released as conscientious objectors instead of fighting in wars against other Muslims. The title of Hasan’s PowerPoint presentation was “The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.” Under a slide titled “Comments,” he wrote: “If Muslim groups can convince Muslims that they are fighting for God against injustices of the ‘infidels’; ie: enemies of Islam, then Muslims can become a potent adversary ie: suicide bombing, etc.” [sic] The last bullet point on that page reads simply: “We love death more then [sic] you love life!” Under the “Conclusions” page, Hasan wrote that “Fighting to establish an Islamic State to please God, even by force, is condoned by the Islam,” and that “Muslim Soldiers should not serve in any capacity that renders them at risk to hurting/killing believers unjustly — will vary!” The final page, labeled “Recommendation,” contained only one suggestion: “Department of Defense should allow Muslims [sic] Soldiers the option of being released as ‘Conscientious objectors’ to increase troop morale and decrease adverse events.”‘[17]
Objections were made to Major Hasan’s tirade: “Students on a 2007-2008 master’s programme at a military college revealed that they had complained to faculty about Major Hasan’s alleged anti-American views. They included him giving a presentation that justified suicide bombing and telling classmates that Islamic law trumped the US Constitution.”[18] But nothing serious happened. According to National Public Radio’s Joseph Shapiro, the worst thing that happened was that Hasan was given a period of probation early in his postgraduate work because of his insistence on seeking to convert to Islam some coworkers and the soldiers he was treating.
The title of this speech, “The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military,” sounds very academic and not very Islamic at all. It seems to imply that Islam and the Koran are just a world view or Weltanschauung among others. It falls far short of the basic Islamic fundamentalist claim to represent the authority of absolute revealed truth. We are reminded of Mohamed Atta’s will and instructions for his own funeral, which Islamic experts have found to be replete with elements and formulations utterly alien to Islam.
The categorical imperative for every mole is to protect the relevant patsies from investigation or arrest until the terror event has occurred and it is time to round the patsies up as scapegoats. The part about “We love death more then [sic] you love life!” is blatant ID format “Al Qaeda” speak, and in a military setting this speech would normally be more than enough to trigger a probing investigation into Major Hasan’s activities and belief structure. But no serious consequences ensued, suggesting that Major Hasan was an asset who was being protected for the sake of some future mission which he was being groomed and prepared to perform.
Thus, while Hasan’s medical superiors were aware of him as a problem case, they chose to do nothing: a ” group of doctors overseeing Nidal Malik Hasan’s medical training discussed concerns about his overly zealous religious views and strange behavior months before the Army major was accused of opening fire on soldiers and civilians at Fort Hood, Texas. Doctors and staff overseeing Hasan’s training viewed him at times as belligerent, defensive and argumentative in his frequent discussions of his Muslim faith, a military official familiar with several group discussions about Hasan said. As a psychiatrist in training, Hasan was characterized in meetings as a mediocre student and lazy worker, a matter of concern among the doctors and staff at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences military medical school, the official said.” (AP, 11 November 2009 )[19] At the same time, the training of a psychiatrist involves intensive psychological profiling an depth analysis by professors as an integral part of the training. As a shrink among shrinks, Major Hasan’s psychology must have been well known to the military doctors who were his professors. This opens up an avenue for manipulating and controlling him which has not been present in other terrorism cases. Did one or more of the Major Hasan’s analysts have a sideline as terrorist controllers and mind benders working for the rogue network?
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